


Failure

by PeculiarRavenclaw



Category: The Witches - Roald Dahl
Genre: Gen, Guilt, Introspection, The Witches-Roald Dahl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-09 23:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19485874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeculiarRavenclaw/pseuds/PeculiarRavenclaw
Summary: As she is turning into a mouse, The Grand High Witch tries to understand what exactly she did wrong to end up in that situation. And she has a lot of material to choose from. Bookverse.





	Failure

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! Hope you'll enjoy this little one-shot about the Grand High Witch!   
> Since I've used elements from the book, and as the book and the movie are quite different, I will put some explanatory things in the end notes to avoid any confusion.

She should have seen it coming. She should have been more careful. Being a Grand High Witch, she had been trained to be cautious, to always pay attention to her surroundings and be careful of every movement.   
And yet, she had chosen to blatantly ignore the warning signs. But now, as she was standing on her chair in the middle of Hotel Magnificent’s dining-room, screaming and frantically waving her arms as pain pulsed through her body, she couldn’t believe how stupid she had been. 

She was the Grand High Witch, for goodness’s sake, a symbol of pure power, she wasn’t supposed to make mistakes. She blinked several times, hoping this was all some awful nightmare, like the ones she was used to having before Annual Meetings, but as the pain intensified and spots started to dance in front of her eyes, she knew that there was no escape. She would not wake up from this nightmare, since it was no nightmare at all. In fact, she started thinking that she would soon find herself not being able to wake up at all.   
As her clothes disappeared and fur started growing on her body, she could see waiters rushing to get knives and heavy objects, hoping to kill the mice that had started swarming on the two long RSPCC tables, in an effort to dissipate the hysteria going on in the dining-room. The Grand High Witch knew that they would soon come for her. 

She watched in horror as some of the English Witches were murdered by the waiters, staining the knives and the table cloth with blood. Thankfully, most of the mice managed to escape, mostly unscathed. While The Grand High Witch herself was used to killing her subjects, this was different. Grand High Witches had to kill at least a witch per meeting, it was some ancient rule that they had to respect; but it could not be compared to what was going on in the dining room. 

As she scurried around, trying to follow the rest of the mice while dodging any murderous waiters or cooks, she tried to understand exactly where she had failed. There were so many answers to chose from, and it made her dizzy. Being in the body of a mouse was not helping.

First of all, her potion was obviously very flawed. It did not ensure full transformation, as the victim still retained his or hers thinking and talking capacities, as demonstrated by the Witches who were yelling “Don’t kill me!”. The Grand High Witch couldn’t understand how she or one of her Assistant Witches did not notice that.  
And then, she had made an even bigger mistake, that is to shrug off the hole in her mattress. As she had slit back open the mattress to give the bottles of Formula 86 to the elder witches as promised, she had noticed a hole in it that hadn’t been there before. And a bottle of formula seemed to be missing, but it was hard to tell since she hadn’t counted them beforehand. She had told herself that she was being paranoid, that no one could have stolen anything from her room. And that simple lack of caution had caused the biggest disaster in the history of witchery. 

Now she could figure out the missing pieces of the puzzle. She understood why an old lady had shouted “Hurry up, my darling! Do hurry up: You'd better come out quickly!” and when confronted, had claimed she was shouting for her grandson, who had been in the bathroom for ages, reading books. She understood why that same old lady had been looking at her so much during dinner, only to quickly turn her gaze away when her eyes met hers. She understood what was in the pea soup. The boy she had turned into a mouse during the Meeting was the grandson of a witch-hunter, also known as a witchophile. That mouse had stolen the formula from her room. And now both grandson and grandmother were taking revenge.  
She finally understood everything, but it was too late.

She had failed, and in doing so, she had doomed herself and all the witches in the whole wide world. 

As the Grand High Witch managed to escape the dining room, followed by a group of mice and hysterical hotel workers, she could sense her strength failing. She was exhausted, dizzy and overwhelmed. She could imagine the disdain on the face of her mentor when she would read about what had happened at Hotel Magnificent, she could see her name printed in every witchery book, describing her as the biggest disappointment and failure in the history of Witches. 

She thought that she was perhaps going to die now, at the young age of 25, but she told herself that at least she would not live to see herself turn into a figure of utter defeat. She couldn’t bear that. She couldn’t bear to witness her loss of power, not after the many years she had spent trying to teach herself to be a merciless leader that was feared and respected by all Witches. She had become cold-blooded and cruel, but in the end, her weaknesses had overpowered her. She was now paying the price of her pride, her know-it-all behavior, her ambition that bordered on delusion and her refusal to ask for help or listen to the opinion of others. 

To her dismay, The Grand High Witch realized that she was never going to see Norway again. She loved her homeland, but now she would probably end up as a dead mouse in a dark corner of Hotel Magnificent.

“Forgive me,” she thought to no one in particular, “I have failed.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Comments are always welcome :)   
> Also, I realize that The Grand High Witch might seem a bit too "human" in this one-shot, but I wanted to add some dimension to her character, and not just represent her as the cold and ruthless villain. 
> 
> Here's some info about the book for my fellow readers who haven't read it:  
> \- The Grand High Witch was the first to transform, unlike in the movie  
> \- It was clearly stated that The Grand High Witch was Norwegian, thus the little part about Norway, and she was also way younger than in the movie (she was about 24-25 years old)  
> \- The Grand High Witch had prepared some formula for the "Ancient Witches" (aka the Witches who were older than seventy) and had hidden those bottles inside her mattress in her hotel room  
> \- It is mentioned that The Grand High Witch is very likely to be surrounded by quite a number of Assistant Witches, who are helping her deal with her duties as a leader.  
> \- In the book, The Grand High Witch and the Grandmother were not old adversaries, the Grandmother had never met the Grand High Witch before.  
> \- It is stated that Grand High Witches must, as a rule, kill one Witch per meeting, in order to keep the rest of them on their toes.


End file.
